H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  Wright may have rejected The Shadow Out of Time because the manuscript was all but illegible, or because; of its extreme length (at nearly twenty-five thousand words, it is one of Lovecraft’s longest stories). At any rate, this would seem to be one of the stories rescued from oblivion through the kind offices of Donald Wandrei, for it eventually wound up in Astounding Stories two years later.

  The evidence suggests that Lovecraft had a lot of fun with this story; at least, more of his playful in-jokes and complimentary references to the members of his salon appear therein. He refers again to Howard’s Valusian serpentfolk, and to Smith’s Hyperborean devil-god, Tsathoggua, and to the Vnaussprechilichen Kulten of Von Junzt.

  He also seems to have used this story to give his imprimatur to the Derleth/Schorer collaboration, The Lair of the Star-Spawn, which was, as mentioned in the preceeding chapter, the story that introduced the concept of the Elder Gods v. the Great Old Ones. That story also introduced the dreaded Tcho-Tcho people, and it is the Tcho-Tchos that Lovecraft mentions here.

  He also added a new book to the ever-growing library of nonexistent tomes so frequently cited in Mythos yams, in his passing reference to “the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules.” This is a rather complicated in-joke, the point of which was probably lost on most readers. It is not so much a pun on Derleth’s name as a reference to Derleth’s family history: Derleth was descended from French aristocracy (there really were Comtes d’Erlette before the storming of the Bastille). The family fled the country to avoid the wholesale slaughter of the aristocrats that occurred with the French Revolution; they took refuge for some time —generations, I gather—in Bavaria, and there the name became Germanicized into “Derleth.” So, by using the obsolete form of the name for the author of an imaginary book of eldritch lore, and the extinct title, Lovecraft was making a joke few readers outside of actual members of the Circle could possibly have understood.

  In the same story Lovecraft mentioned two other books: Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis and “the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards.” Both Ludvig Prinn and his Mysteries of the Worm were the inventions of young Robert Bloch. Bloch introduced Prinn and his book in a story first published in Wright’s magazine the following year, 1935, which means that he had either discussed his contributions to the Mythos with Lovecraft in advance, or showed him the manuscript of the story a year or more before it finally got into print.

  While working up my research notes for this book, I became curious as to the exact process used by members of the Lovecraft Circle in making their additions to the lore of the Mythos. I wrote to some of them asking just how they had gone about inventing the imaginary books, authors and devil gods, and to what extent they had discussed their innovations in advance with Lovecraft.

  Derleth replied that, in general, “We usually showed him our stories before they were printed.” He recalled seeing a lengthy exchange of correspondence between Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, in which the two worked out the details of the latter writer’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt. (The Lovecraft side of this particular sequence of letters will probably be included in the third volume of the Selected Letters, not yet available as I write this.) However, as Derleth recalled it, Smith did not do this. He felt that Smith’s contributions to the Mythos were not seen by Lovecraft in advance, and that Lovecraft was not consulted during their creation.

  Robert Bloch, however, had a different story to tell. In a letter dated June 7, 1971, he wrote to me on this point as follows:

  As I recall, I came up with Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm and HPL quickly supplied me with the Latinized title; we had some minor discussion of the volume’s publishing history, I believe' but it was tongue- in-cheek.

  Bloch adds that it is rather hard to recall these things in any detail after a span of something like thirty-six years, admitting that “such a time-span tends to dim one’s flashes of recall.” But, continuing on the subject of Ludvig Prinn and De Vermis Mysteriis, he remarks that both Kuttner and Earl Peirce 2* also picked up Prinn and his eldritch tome, mentioning them in some of their stories. (Henry Kuttner, then a young fan, began corresponding with Bloch from California in early 1936; before long he, too, moved into the Lovecraft Circle. Derleth was of the opinion that Henry Kuttner corresponded with Lovecraft very slightly, perhaps only during “the last eighteen months or so of Lovecraft’s life”)

  Bloch himself was only eighteen years old at this point; he eventually became one of the most prolific of the important writers who contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, and between 1935 and 1951 he published no less than eleven tales which are firmly a part of the literature of the Mythos, together with a number of borderline stories. In time, his complete contribution to the literature of the Mythos proved larger than either that of Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith, and much larger than that of Long. In fact, only August Derleth wrote more Mythos stories then he.

  As for those “disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards,” they first made their appearance in this story, if my chronology is correct. However, they also appear in one of the Lovecraft revisions, The Diary of Alonzo Typer, by William Lumley, published in Weird Tales for February, 1938. Since it sometimes took Farnsworth Wright a year or two, or even three, to get around to publishing a story he had purchased, it is altogether possible that the Shards were invented by Lumley. Anyway, they made yet a further appearance a year after this in The Challenge From Beyond.

  While The Shadow Out of Time languished unpublished, Lovecraft turned his attention to an amusing idea suggested by a prominent fanzine of the period called Fantasy Magazine.

  This was one of the more ambitious of the fan productions, and it was printed in hand-set type, featuring articles, poems and stories by both amateur and professional writers in the related fields of fantasy and science fiction. To highlight their third anniversary issue, the editors of Fantasy Magazine suggested a round-robin story. Each author would write a segment and pass it along to the next. The same sort of thing had been done with considerable success with a science fiction epic called Cosmos, to which eighteen writers had contributed, among them such famous names as A. Merritt, E. E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and Otis Adelbert Kline.

  The new story would be called The Challenge from Beyond, and for it the editors of the fanzine had coaxed contributions from a staggering array of the more celebrated authors of the Weird Tales group—A. Merritt, 3* H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, and Frank Belknap Long. It was Miss Moore who opened the story, followed by Merritt. Lovecraft’s segment is a bit more rounded than the other contributions and could perhaps be published as a short story in its own right.

  The story as a whole is not only remarkably brief for a round-robin yarn spun done by five writers—it is only about 6,400 words long—but, it also hangs together remarkably well. Lovecraft’s contribution to it is rather interesting; he wrote the central portion of the story, and his episode is about three times longer than that of any of the others. He obviously wrote his portion while at work on The Shadow Out of Time, because he goes into the history of the Great Race (left unnamed in his text, but obviously that) and tells quite a bit more about “those debatable and disquieting clay fragments called the Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in southern England thirty years before.” Because it embroiders on Mythos lore established elsewhere, I cannot help but consider that The Challenge from Beyond qualifies as a Mythos story.

  It seems to me rather odd that Clark Ashton Smith was not invited to contribute a segment to this famous round-robin story. But perhaps he was, and declined. By 1935, by his own count, Smith had written about one hundred short stories and was very near the end of his interest in this form.4* From the partial list of dates, it looks to me as if he wrote no stories at all between 1933 and 1937. This falling off of production may have been why he declined to contribute a segment to The Challenge from Beyond (if indeed he had been asked to do so, which is probably the case).

 
Most of Smith’s contribution to the Mythos appears in his Hyperborean story cycle, which introduced such demonic entities as Tsathoggua, Abhoth, Ubbo-Sathla, and Atlach-Natcha to the pantheon, and the Book of Eibon to the library. By 1935, Smith had completed the entire cycle, save for a last story, The Theft of Thirty-nine Girdles, which was a late tale, not published until 1958. (Unfortunately, we do not have the date of composition for this tale.)

  Smith did a lot of his work in story cycles, such as his several tales about Poseidonis—his name for the last isle of foundering Atlantis—and the Zothique stories. Neither of these utilized the Cthulhuoid apparatus. But Smith also wrote a sequence of tales set in Averoigne, an imaginary province of Medieval France. Most amusingly, he decided to include some of his Hyperborean material in these stories, making one of his characters, Gaspard du Nord, the translator of the elder Book of Eibon from Latin (in which tongue it is known as the Liber Ivonie) into 13th-century French, as the Livre d'Eibon.

  A number of the characters in Smith’s Averoigne tales are Medieval wizards, and it is amusing to hear them invoke “Zhothaqquah,” “Yok-Zothoth,” and “Kthulhut”—which I assume are the French “translation” of Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

  As for the other writer-members of the Lovecraft Circle, Derleth had published his second Mythos tale, The Thing that Walked on the Wind, in 1933, and it would be some years before he returned to take up his work in the Lovecraft vein. Long was busied with other affairs, too.

  Howard had just about exhausted his ideas for Cthulhuoid stories and had moved on to other and undoubtedly better things. I refer, of course, to his Conan stories. The first of these, a rip-roaring swashbuckler entitled The Phoenix on the Sword, had seen the light of print only three years before, in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales. The response from readers had been wildly enthusiastic. Earlier, Howard had dabbled rather unsuccessfully in the field of the heroic fantasy tale set in imaginary prehistoric kingdoms with a couple of yarns about an Atlantean savage named Kull, who single-handedly invaded the mainland and usurped the throne of the ancient and wealthy realm of Valusia. Possibly inspired by certain very similar stories of his friend, Clark Ashton Smith— who was doing much the same sort of thing with his Hyperborea and Zothique yarns—Howard had belted off a bundle of these “King Kull” adventure stories to Weird Tales. In typical fashion, Farnsworth Wright had looked them over with a sour eye and belted them right back—all but two, which he eventually printed. One of the lucky two was The Shadow Kingdom, and you will recall how Lovecraft borrowed the serpentfolk of Valusia from that yarn to add to his growing corpus of Mythos lore.

  I have seen the bundle of rejected King Kull stories —in fact, I edited, rewrote and finished some of them when the complete saga was eventually published (the book was called King Kull, published by Lancer in 1967; there have been a couple of printings since then, and I believe the book is still in print). They are not bad at all; a couple of them are superb vintage Sword & Sorcery tales, as good as anything Howard ever wrote. I am at a loss to understand why Farnsworth Wright refused them.

  Howard evidently felt much the same way. He took one of the better yarns, By This Axe I Rule!, and rewrote it, keeping most of the names and much of the plot but introducing into the turmoil of the story a certain burly Cimmerian adventurer named Conan. Then he retitled it and shot it off to Farnsworth Wright, and this time it was snapped up. And that is how the first Conan story came to be written!

  With Howard busily creating his world of the Hyborian Age and the saga of its mightiest hero, only Robert Bloch was left to work in the Lovecraftian vein. Bloch was corresponding very steadily with Lovecraft, and under the stimulus of the older writer’s encouragement, he was turning out stories for Weird Tales at a furious rate. The very first story he wrote which at all used the apparatus of the Cthulhu Mythos —or at least the very first one to get into print— was a comparatively minor effort called The Secret in the Tomb, which Wright ran in his May 1935 issue. This was followed by The Suicide in the Study, another Mythos tale, in the June issue. By this time, not only had Bloch invented Ludvig Prinn, author of the hellish Mysteries of the Worm, but he had picked up and was using Lovecraft’s newest addition to the Cthulhuoid library, d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules.

  1935 had yet some months to go, and Bloch got one more Cthulhu Mythos story into print in Weird Tales that year—a story called The Shambler from the Stars, which Wright printed in his September 1935 issue.

  For that story, Bloch had the amusing idea of using Lovecraft himself as the main character. As Derleth described the incident, Robert Bloch, having proposed to have a little weird fun at Lovecraft’s expense, wrote asking his permission to annihilate him in a story entitled The Shambler from the Stars. Lovecraft’s fine sense of humor brought forth permission not only signed by Lovecraft, but also by his prime creation, the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, and by others of the Cthulhu Mythos —von Junzt, du Nord, and the Tcho-Tcho lama of Leng.

  This “document” was reproduced in 1944 from the original Lovecraft letter and served as one of the illustrations in a book called Marginalia, an omnibus; volume of odds and ends of fiction, verse and articles by and about Lovecraft. The letter reads like this:

  Providence, R. I., April 30, 1935

  To Whom it May Concern:

  This is to certify that Robert Bloch, Esq., of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.—reincarnation of Meinheer Ludvig Prinn, author of De Vermis Mysteriis—is fully authorised to portray, murder, annihilate, disintegrate, transfigure, metamorphose, or otherwise manhandle the undersigned in the tale entitled The Shambler from the Stars.

  (signed) H. P. LOVECRAFT

  Attest:

  Abdul Alhazred

  Gaspard du Nord (translator, Le Livre d’Eibon)

  Fvindvuf von Junzt (Author: Unaussprechlichen Kulten)

  Tcho-Tcho Lama of Leng

  These signatures (which, unfortunately, I cannot reproduce here) are also quite amusing. Alhazred’s name is signed in what looks to me like decent Arabic, and Gaspard du Nord’s signature is written in flowing swash characters that would not look out of place on a Medieval document. As for the signature of that mysterious Lama of Leng, whose features, you will recall, are ever hidden behind a mask-like veil of yellow silk, and who dwells alone in a prehistoric stone monastery, it is written in what appears to be Sanskrit characters, insofar as I can judge.

  I can imagine with what delight Bloch received this tongue-in-cheek document. He sat right down to “annihilate” Lovecraft in his story. And thereby hangs a tale.

  In fact, come to think of it, thereby hang three of them.

  ***

  1* Four years after his death, this story found its way into print in a fantasy fanzine called Bizarre, dated January, 1941. It was the very last of his amateur press appearances.

  2* In later years to become one of Bloch’s discoveries, a young Milwaukee protege of his own.

  3* It is not generally remembered that A. Merritt was indeed a Weird Tales writer. Although the bulk of his stories and novels appeared in the mass-market adventure pulps of larger circulation, like Argosy and All-Story Weekly, one of the loveliest of his rare short stories, The Woman of the Wood, appeared in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. I say “rare” because Merritt wrote only six finished short stories, not counting the opening segments of a couple of his novels which appeared separately, with the continuation of the novel published as a sort of “sequel.”

  4* Smith kept a careful list of his stories, with the day, month and year of the writing of each tale, and the date of later revisions, if any. This document, two sheets of paper titled “Completed Stories,” was found among his papers after his death by Roy A. Squires of Glendale, California, who had known Smith, and who for a time after the writer’s demise took care of the Smith papers. Squires, who has passed a copy along to me, has numbered the stories in chronological order by date of composition; with a few holes, the list totals 111 titles.

 
11. The Last Incantation

  Actually, The Shambler from the Stars is three kinds of fiction at once: a horror story, a pastiche on Lovecraft’s style, and an elaborate joke. Bloch later became known as one of the very few fantasy or horror or science fiction writers who knew how to use humor; this tale demonstrates his talents superbly. The tone of voice is solemn enough, but the Lovecraftian hyperbole and rhetoric is ever so slightly overdone; almost, but not quite, to the point of caricature, as the following passage suggests:

  I yearned to know the terrors of the grave; the kiss of maggots on my tongue, the cold caress of a rotting shroud upon my body. I thirsted for the knowledge that lies in the pits of mummied eyes, and burned for wisdom known only to the worm...

  Lovecraft, in a typical burst of florid prose, might well have penned the first phrase of the above, but I believe even he would have refrained from yearning for “the kiss of maggots” on the tongue!

  As Bloch’s story progresses, his narrator, a writer of weird fiction in the manner of Poe and Machen (whose name is not given in the tale), makes a friend of “a mystic dreamer in New England,” which is very obviously meant to be Lovecraft. “It was from the latter that I learned of the ancient books that hold strange lore,” says Bloch, very straight-faced, through the voice of his narrator. “He quoted guardedly from the legendary Necronomicon and spoke timidly of a certain Book of Eibon that was reputed to surpass it in the utter wildness of its blasphemy. He himself had been a student of these volumes of primal dread, but... he had heard many strange things... in witch-haunted Arkham, where the old shadows still leer and creep.”

  Then Bloch has his character go on a search in the local second-hand bookstores, trying to find the Necronomicon —a rather droll idea, if you have ever done much hunting through such establishments (you are more likely to find Volume VII of Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic than the works of the mad Arab). He does, in fact, turn up a mouldering copy of Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, tucked in between a couple of volumes of Shakespeare. (He remarks that the proprietor was “obviously unaware of its nature.” Equally obvious is the fact that the poor man was unaware of its value, for Bloch’s character buys the ancient tome for $1.00!)